The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the state's death penalty was so flawed for so long that more than half of the people on death row may be entitled to new sentencing hearings.

That opinion, handed down in a pair of decisions Thursday, covers more than 200 inmates awaiting execution — and includes all of those who were sentenced after 2002 or whose appeals were not final by that year.

It is a legal decision that death row inmates, defense attorneys, prosecutors and the families of murder victims have awaited since January, when the U.S. Supreme Court found the state's death penalty unconstitutional.

ID photos of Central Florida convicted killers on Florida death row.

(Florida Department of Corrections)

That ruling made it clear that Florida needed to rework its death penalty statute to bring it in line with other states that handled those cases, specifically by requiring that juries — not judges —make the key findings required to impose a death sentence.

With Thursday's rulings, trial courts across Florida face the prospect of being swamped by requests from death row inmates, asking to be resentenced.

A substantial portion of them should be granted, said retired Circuit Judge O.H. Eaton Jr. of Sanford.

"There's going to be one hell of a lot of determinations as to whether these people are entitled to new penalty phases," he said.

The Florida Supreme Court on Wednesday threw out the death penalty of a man convicted of murdering a state prison guard, ruling that because his jury did not unanimously recommend a death sentence, he must be resentenced by a new jury.

The ruling could have implications for others on Florida's death...

The flood of new petitions could result in a backlog that might take ten years to unjam, said Orange-Osceola Public Defender Robert Wesley.

The rulings apply to more than 40 Central Florida convicted murderers.

They include Bessman Okafor, who in 2012 killed an Orange County man who was about to testify against him at a home invasion trial; ax murderer John Buzia, a handyman convicted of killing an elderly Seminole County man in 2004; and Michael Gordon Reynolds, who beat and stabbed to death a Seminole County father, mother and 11-year-old daughter in 1998.

In Orange and Osceola counties, 10 of 24 death row inmates could be eligible for new sentences, said Assistant State Attorney Ken Nunnelley.

A moratorium since January

Thursday's decision is the result of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in January.

By a vote of 8-1, that court ruled that jurors — not a judge — must specifically identify why someone convicted of a capital crime should be put to death.

That case involved Timothy Lee Hurst, a Pensacola man convicted of murdering his boss at a Popeyes Fried Chicken restaurant in 1998 with a box cutter, then putting her body in a freezer.

The high court found that Florida's death penalty statute was unconstitutional, but left it to the Florida Supreme Court to decide whether the ruling should apply retroactively.

The state has not executed an inmate since then.

The state supreme court has issued several death penalty rulings in the interim. Some hinted that it would interpret the Hurst decision broadly, but each stopped short of spelling it out.

On Thursday, that changed. The court laid it out: Every death penalty handed down in Florida since 2002 is unconstitutional. That's 55 percent of the state's death row population.

That's because, in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling — Ring v. Arizona — that generally said the same thing to the state of Arizona that the high court said to Florida in the Hurst decision 14 years later: Juries — not judges — must decide whether the death penalty is appropriate.

"Florida's capital sentencing statute has essentially been unconstitutional since Ring in 2002," the court wrote in one of Thursday's rulings, that of John F. Mosley, a Jacksonville-area man given the death penalty for placing his infant son in a plastic bag in 2004 and allowing him to suffocate.

The Florida Legislature rewrote the death penalty statute last winter, giving juries more authority, and Gov. Rick Scott signed it into law on March 7, but in October, the Florida Supreme Court threw it out, saying it was unconstitutional because it failed to require a unanimous vote by jurors before the death penalty could be imposed.

As a consequence, the state currently has no death penalty statute.

384 inmates on death row

One of the factors the Florida Supreme Court had to evaluate was the level of disruption its ruling would create at trial courts around the state.

It concluded that including all 384 death row inmates would be too burdensome.

Even so, it set the stage for what could become nearly 200 resentencings: mini-trials at which a new jury would listen to evidence then rule whether the defendant should be given the death penalty.

It will not be easy, Wesley said.

Inmates must individually petition the court, and prosecutors will have a chance to argue that their sentences were fair, Nunnelley said.

If a judge sides with the inmate, a new jury would decide whether he or she should be sentenced to death. If their decision is not unanimous, the inmate would be sentenced to life in prison.

"Witnesses will have died. Memories will have failed. People will have disappeared," Wesley said.

Eaton predicted that most inmates would qualify for resentencing. The most likely exceptions, he said, were those who chose to have a judge — not a jury — handle the penalty phase of their trials and those whose juries voted 12-0 in favor of the death penalty.

Thursday's other ruling came in the case of Mark James Asay, who was convicted of killing two people, a black man and a transvestite, in 1987 in Jacksonville.

He was scheduled to be executed March 17, but that was put on hold after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Hurst case.

On Thursday, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that Asay was not entitled to a new sentencing hearing because his trial and initial round of appeals played out before 2002.

The state has executed one person who might have benefited from Thursday's ruling: Oscar Ray Bolin Jr., who was put to death in January for murdering three young women in the Tampa Bay area in 1986.